Explanation:
What lies at the center of our galaxy?
In Jules Verne's
science fiction classic,
A Journey
to the Center of the Earth, Professor Liedenbrock
and his fellow explorers encounter many strange and exciting wonders.
Astronomers already know of some of the
bizarre objects that exist at our
Galactic Center, including
vast cosmic dust clouds,
bright star clusters,
swirling rings of gas, and even a
supermassive black hole.
Much of the Galactic Center is
shielded from our view in visible light
by the intervening dust and gas, but it can be explored using
other forms of
electromagnetic radiation.
The
featured video
is actually a digital zoom into the
Milky Way's center
which starts by utilizing visible light images from the
Digitized Sky Survey.
As the movie
proceeds, the light shown shifts to dust-penetrating
infrared
and highlights gas clouds that were recently discovered in 2013 to be falling
toward the central black hole.
